So: it was the early-to-mid 1970′s, the Golden Age of the made-for-TV movie. From the legendary producer Dan Curtis came the story of a journalist who discovers that the boundary between this world and The Next is very thin… and that horrible creatures are trying to cross it with distressing regularity. No, I am not talking about “The Night Stalker”. I’m talking about The Norliss Tapes (1973)…

…though frankly, if I had been talking about “The Night Stalker”, I doubt if I could have mentioned “The Night Stalker” as many times as I mention “The Night Stalker” while I’m not talking about “The Night Stalker”. Because “The Norliss Tapes”, intended to be the pilot for a weekly series, just didn’t have the necessary magic… while “The Night Stalker”, which had been intended as a one-off, went on to become one of the most memorable horror series in TV history. Why did the one show succeed, while the other disappeared into oblivion? Read on…

While we hear a great deal, in one pop cultural context or another, about The People Who Cancelled Star Trek, what I want to know is—

Who was it that deprived the world of a television series that must have been pitched with the line, “So—Leonard Nimoy is a racing-car driver who turns occult detective after he starts experiencing psychic flashes.”

Sigh.

BAFFLED! (1973)

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In the 1970s and 1980s, it was a common practice for television producers with a new potential TV series in mind to make what were called “backdoor pilots”. These were feature-length pilots that could be aired as made-for-television movies of the week, even if the networks passed on making them weekly series before they were aired. The Hanged Man is one such backdoor pilot. Whether the networks passed on making it a series before or after it was aired, I do not know, but it’s safe to say that this was one rejection that was justified.

KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK

Review Snippet:
The best way to describe “KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park” is to say that it is a “Scooby-Doo” episode, but starring KISS instead of a bunch of meddling kids and a talking dog. Yes, that really is KISS, and they really are investigating a mystery in an amusement park. No, they don’t have a talking dog; though I suppose that quite a few reasonable arguments could be made that Peter Criss or Gene Simmons is standing in for Scooby.

Something to watch for:
Gene Simmons is unable to turn his head without sticking out his tongue.

Behold– an unprecedented THREE roundtables in a single post! (Mind you, the reason it’s unprecedented is because nobody was ever this late with their damn reviews before…)

The Cabin in the Woods (2009/2012), in which despte all appearances to the contrary, it isn’t Spam in that cabin– which, for that matter, isn’t strictly speaking a cabin, either…

The Fellowship of the Frog (1959), in which the masked arch-criminal could perhaps have chosen a slightly scarier theme for his supervillain identity…

The H-Man (1958), in which the “H” is analogous to the one in ”H-bomb,” but that’s kind of beside the point…

Hercules and the Princess of Troy (1965), which represents the only time Joseph E. Levine failed to make a fortune on Hercules…

The Hunger Games (2012), in which you all probably know more than I do anyway…

John Carter (2012), in which an ex-Confederate cavalry captain runs eight zillion green guys through with a sword, fights a giant four-armed gorilla, and blows up a bunch of totally boss airships, and yet somehow nobody cares…

The Mad Executioners (1963), in which there’s a secret, underground murder tribunal, an imposter secret, underground murder tribunal, and an ersatz Jack the Ripper, and the whole mess almost makes sense even so…

Shark Attack (1999), in which no one would give a crap about yet another bad, intermittently boring Jaws ripoff, had it not been also the movie that turned the Sci-Fi Channel into the Bad, Intermittently Boring Jaws Ripoff Channel…

The Slayer (1981), which subjects the Spam-in-a-Cabin premise to almost as much distortion as The Cabin in the Woods…

and…

Species (1995), in which Sir Ben Kingsley sees the face of his future, but doesn’t realize it yet.
 
 
 

If your wish is for a movie that’s breezy and pleasurable to watch, the Bruno Corbucci family movie Aladdin is a safe bet. Sure, it’s sloppily plotted, and its sense of humor is sometimes extremely goofy, but there’s still plenty to like here that makes the movie a charming viewing experience for kids and their parents.

RED RIDING HOOD

I’m not a fan of either Twilight or Harry Potter, but neither am I a detractor, as I have never read either series and likely never will. I have seen some Harry Potter movies, and they were all right, though it turns out that not everyone counts Troll as part of the series. Good or bad, however, there’s obviously something in both of those series that was perfectly timed to tap into a zeitgeist that propelled them to the upper ranks of popularity that was not obtained by their imitators or even by the books (or movies) they themselves might have been imitating. There was something that happened to make each of those the successful ones, and whether you love, hate, or don’t care about either series, there’s no denying that they did something right. Red Riding Hood was one of the first movies to copy the overwrought YA melodrama of Twilight, and few people seem to remember Red Riding Hood was even made.

At one point, a character in the European superhero movie Superargo says, “I can’t really put very much confidence in an agent who calls himself Superargo and wears a mask and has that strange costume.” Indeed, it won’t take long for most modern day audiences watching the movie to express little confidence in the rest of the movie. There is some definite camp appeal here, but not enough for my tastes.

Looks like me and Andrew were on the same wavelength this week, monster-movie wise!

SECTOR 7

Sector 7 is the very worst kind of movie with which to be confronted. OK, maybe not. Maybe What Happens in Vegas is the very worst kind of movie with which to be confronted, but since that’s not the sort of movie I seek out, and Sector 7 is, then the wounds I suffer at the hands of Sector 7 leaves a much deeper scar than any injuries I may have suffered while confined to a seat in a bus where they were playing What Happens in Vegas. Sector 7 is the person who should be your friend, but when you are dangling over the precipice and it is holding on to you, it suddenly flashes an evil grin and lets go, allowing you to fall to your death puzzled by this betrayal. Also, you are falling into lava. Sector 7, you were a flashy, big budget monster movie set on an oil rig and fronted by a wickedly cute actress with decent biceps. How could you do this too me? How could you be so very bad on pretty much every single level?

SEA BEAST

What do you get when you cross “Jaws” with “Predator” and cast a 1990s pop culture star as the protagonist? Why yes, this is a SyFy original movie. How did you know?

Review Snippet:
Without any way to contact the mainland, Carly and Danny leave the cabin behind. They trek across the island to an old ferry where they hope to find a radio. As soon as those two mentioned the ferry, I knew that the monster’s nest was going to be inside. In fact, no matter where Danny and Carly decided to go from the cabin, it would be where the Sea Beast laid her eggs. I don’t care if they were going to the abandoned Starbucks on the island, in hopes that the free WiFi was still running, that’s where all of the eggs would be.

Lesson Learned:
Blinking is a telltale sign of rigormortis.